


We Fly

by thesometimeswarrior



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Hellenistic Religion & Lore, Metamorphoses - Ovid
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Mental Instability, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 01:23:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7019683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesometimeswarrior/pseuds/thesometimeswarrior
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Those individuals are destined to strive for glory by attempting what is out of their human sphere. In attempting to fly thus, they are destined to fall."</p><p>Daedalus is obsessed. It is, he tells himself, an illness so carefully constructed by the gods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Fly

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote while this in high school, as an extra credit project for my Latin class. I found it again while cleaning out the hard drive on my old computer and thought I would share. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

We build wings. We test them. We fly. Either we have ambition, which the gods interpret as hubris, as a threat—we fly too high, as it were, and we pay the price for it. We fall. Or, we can be safe. We can not strive for the greatness that we were never meant to achieve. We can fly in a straight line, landing properly, and walk away—walk into the gods’ hands, into Charon’s ferry and out of history. No monuments are built, no seas are named for those who land safely, simply because no one sees them. Flights do not catch eyes—they’re not glorious enough—only falls. Our sightlines are set by the gods to inspire fear of achieving glory, because those that do are celebrated, yes, but celebrated always with a looming memory of the death—often gruesome and premature—that brought about the celebrations. Our eyes and minds were shaped with this very specific purpose in mind; the Creator truly is a master craftsman. 

I never sought glory per se, as much as I feared bringing all traces of my life with me across the Styx and into Dis, and if glory was the way to leave something behind, I would achieve it. Once, I was naive enough to believe that remnants were not solely dependent on falling. For glory, I sculpted. I built. I did what made me happy, what I thought would make an impression. Because that is what everything was—is—always about, not just for me, but all of us in this pathetic race: the impression. The calculations. Always the calculations. Human beings are, have always been, mathematically, scientifically-minded. Some of us—Pythagoras, myself, etc.—simply admit it. But the poets, too, are constantly triangulating the angles of their impact, of their remembrance; the only difference between Orpheus and myself is that he wraps the process in the pretty ribbon of music. I don’t.

It is here that the Creator exhibits another masterful stroke of skill. In our minds he has inserted this innate fear of not being remembered, of fading away—and he shapes our minds so that the ratio of this fright to other thoughts and feelings is greater in some of our species than in others. And those individuals whose ratio is exceedingly large are compelled to achieve glory with such a drive that their fall is inevitable. The fear outweighs the logic and the lessons learned from history and mythology, the other fear that is a gift from the Creator—it plagues the minds of the affected individuals with arrogance, with a false sense of invulnerability—so that those individuals are destined to strive for glory by attempting what is out of their human sphere. In attempting to fly thus, they are destined to fall. 

I was one of those afflicted by this condition, this illness—for truly it is an illness. The fears overcame all else of my mind, ate away at my every thought not already pertaining to my legacy until it was all that existed inside my head, and it even became counterproductive to itself. My best chance—or so I thought at the time—of leaving an impression upon this world was my inventiveness, and my parasitic frights ate away at even that, until inventing itself became impossible.

And yet, familial obligation mandated that I take my sister’s boy, Perdix, as an apprentice, and the Fates—or whoever it was that decided that my Fall was to remain an infamous example stamped throughout history—mandated that he be brilliant. A mere child, he held at his disposal absolute finesse of creative innovation, designing amongst a thousand other things, something as fundamental as the first saw. _Surely_ , my sickness whispered to me, _surely the boy’s designs will mark him for greatness. Surely he will be remembered for them throughout time—he will be the great innovator, and you, Daedalus, if you are remembered at all, will be so only as the master of the genius._ And my mind screamed at this notion! Legacy only in the context of another was like no legacy at all—and the latter was a possibility as well. _No!_ The sickness screamed. _No, Daedalus! NO! It’s the boy’s fault, Daedalus! Eliminate the boy before he is recognized as genius, and then it will be you who holds this legacy!_ And with the torturous screaming in my head, all I could do was obey. 

Perhaps it was illogical of me to throw an ingenious boy from the temple of the patron goddess of genius, but the sickness, as I previously said, outweighed all rational thoughts in my mind. And a grudge from one particular goddess meant very little; events that seem the results of our own actions are not truly within our control. No matter what we do in this world, our fate is inevitable. Thus was mine. I was destined for infamy, and Minerva’s dislike of me, even if well-earned, was only a continuation of the pattern selected for me at my conception, something that the Fates—or whoever designs the entertainment for the gods and keeps us human beings as servile in inferiority—had planned from my conception. 

And likewise was the flight planned—all of the flights. First, my flight from Athens. Athenians admired genius beyond all else—and the boy I had attempted to kill was regarded as genius itself in human form. Such aggravated me, as prior to his coming, my intelligence was that which epitomized genius. It seemed in my city, my fears were realizing themselves; but rather than being remembered as the teacher of the genius, I was recalled as the murderer of the genius—a worse connotation. I had to establish myself somewhere else. I fled. 

I fled, and yet the sick fear of fading away still raged inside of me. A quiet, unassuming life did not serve to alleviate these fears; I needed to create a new life in which it was still possible to make a mark, to invent miraculously. I wandered from court to court, province to province, finding no commissions worthy of my talents or likely to gain me glory and remembrance, until--the Fates would have it— I crossed paths with Minos, the king of Crete and the largest enemy of my former people, and he decided that I was to be made an advisor to the Cretian crown. And I innovated. I built spectacles for him, his children, his wife, did what no one else had ever done, created that which, I was certain, no other man could create—such as an unsolvable puzzle in which to house a beast—the half-human bastard son of the queen.

And yet, even that brought me no lasting glory. Did it bring me Minos’s favor? Yes. But glory, public credit, legacy? No. And, then I realized, such was because those who entered the heart of my Labyrinth, those who saw its true genius, never returned from its depths to tell of it. In order to gain fame for my creation, it needed to be witnessed—and the witness needed to speak of it. When Theseus—a tribute from my own former city—was sent as per a war concession agreement with Minos to be let into my cage to serve as food for the beast, I seized opportunity. Fortune favored me with the fact that Minos’s daughter held in her chest the deepest lovesickness for the Athenian tribute, and, once again submitting to my own illness rather than my logic, I showed the princess how Theseus might escape my maze. The princess and her would-be lover were successful—but too in love with each other, at first, to think of my creation, and later, the Athenian was too self-obsessed to think of me. 

Minos, meanwhile, was unamused. Under a charge of treason, he instantly changed my high position from high-servant to prisoner of the island, and locked me with my young son—whom I acquired unwittingly on my quest for legacy—in a tower, surrounded on three sides by the sea. Escape, it seemed, was impossible.

And still my sickness raged. Locked away to die, I certainly would not be remembered. But Minos underestimated me—no tower could contain my mind, which flew out of my prison and into the open air, still wandering, still searching for a way to achieve glory, to not simply fade away with the inevitable end of my life, and when my wits returned from their journey, they brought with them an epiphany. As long as I was a man, I was fated to dwindle as I crossed the Styx, but there was no need for me to remain solely a member of this infernal race. The gods were immortal, and the answer—so resoundingly simple, it seemed—was to be like them, transform myself into something else as they do. The gods have never been bound by their physical forms; why should I? 

And transform myself I did. All my powers of invention went toward building bird-wings for myself and for my son, and, naturally then, I succeeded. As we stood perched in the window, I looked at the sky with pride. The heavens were where I belonged—my domain--and I had been blind to that truth my entire life. Legacy had hung above my head throughout it so close, simply waiting for me to find it—to be ambitious and reach for it.

I soared through the windy heavens, feeling so at home, knowing that this was that for which I had strived. Finally my illness would cease. Finally, I would not live in fear. Distant onlookers from the islands saw my figure, and I imagined how I must have looked in their eyes: a god, certainly! They would never forget me, never. I would be alive forever. 

The ecstasy, however, was short-lived; I watched as the figure of my son strove to be far more than he possibly could, to fly too high, only to be struck down by the gods, plummeting down into the watery depths. But as he fell, I saw not his face, but my own, squinched in terror as it fell and drowned. 

No one would forget the image throughout all of time: the figure of the flying, falling boy—so naive, such a child, trying so hard to be like a god, so much more than he could be. The would-be immortal false deity was always destined to plunge into the sea.


End file.
